Trying to make this bugger to work.
Third attempt tonight

Did some more work to my 386 build tonight. Tidied the cabling up a bit, added a MPU401 card and a Sound Blaster Pro. Also switched out the Mitsumi drive for the Panasonic 5 disc changer and added a 5 1/4" Floppy drive.

Fancy schmancy.

Man, I love that case and the rest too!

ho ho that disc changer is a dandy! does it make interesting sounds?

Today I tested an old 10GB HDD for the first time after sitting on my shelf for 15 years. I don't remember exactly why I took it out of service back then but it appears it was already dead back in the days. I seem to just have forgotten about it. As a positive side effect this allowed me to set my destructive nature free. As always, I don't sell used HDD's (no matter if dead or not) for privacy reasons. I had plenty of fun, opening this can and using all kinds of tools to convert this once helpful piece of PC hardware into unrestorable scrap metal parts.

oeuvre wrote:

ho ho that disc changer is a dandy! does it make interesting sounds?

In the 90's, these multi-disc changers were always tempting. I hear they don't last long though because it involves a lot of moving parts that easily break. I haven't seen one on sale second hand either or I'd definitely grab one just for games like Under A Killing Moon, Ripper, Wing Commander 3, ...

Ugh the smell of blown tantalum cap just doesn't want to get out of my fingers...

Fortunately it was worth it. My colleagues who gave me a beautiful ancient NEC mono monitor wanted to see it in action. So I decided to build a tiny PC I could easily take to work. It's based on a Cx486SLC/e board that survived appalling corrosion, now has a 3x AAA battery holder keeping time and I fitted out with a Gotek and an ATi Small Wonder for Hercules goodness. It's not quite complete yet, the case has a built-in 44p IDE to 40p converter, but my only 44p HDD is 60GB, and somehow this 1992 BIOS can't handle that. I do have a 1GB SSD module, but of course it has a female, not a male connector... Oh well, ordered a gender changer. But for showing off at work, booting off Gotek is more than good enough. Skeletor approves in any event:

Finally fixed a Diamond Monster 3D! I have a few of these and they have given me a ton of problems, all of them. A couple years ago when I knew even less about this stuff I replaced most (yeah... doh) of the 10uf 16v SMD electrolytic caps on two of these cards with some generic ones from eBay because some were missing and some had dents in them from storage. They have never worked reliably beyond the most basic 3dfx Voodoo tech demos and 3dmark 99. In games they'd either have massive artifacts or they'd crash with an error. I was sick of them being so unreliable and wasn't sure what to do, so I packed them away for two years.

The other day I replaced all of the 10uf 16v caps with some low-impedance ones I bought from mouser and, not only did I realize that I'm not nearly as inept at this as I used to be (it went fairly quickly) but I just tested the card and it works perfectly in some pretty stressful games. I tried Descent 3, Mysteries of the Sith Demo and Interstate 76 Nitro Pack (3d accelerated) demo. I was pleasantly surprised by the performance too. People's expectations with regard to frame rate were quite low at that time and when the card was a year or two old it was already way behind, so to play Descent 3 at 640x480 (with some settings turned off) on a first gen 4MB 3D accelerator at a playable (if low) frame rate was pretty cool.

Now I just need to fix the other ones. 😀

Been properly testing out some of the MIDI modules I've bought lately, beyond plugging them into a keyboard and pressing keys. I did it on an XP machine as the only other machine I have set up for it is DOS, and it's much easier to transfer MIDI files through USB from the computer next to it than CF between computers in two different rooms.

It was a messy but thankfully very temporary setup. An old P4 Dell Optiplex with a Sound Blaster Live! sticking out of it. It only supported half height cards, but thankfully the back could be removed and the top left off during testing. It seemed as though I only had a single USB keyboard in the house, so I had to run my main PC's keyboard over into the Optiplex while I used my phone as my main computer's keyboard to find and transfer MIDI files I wanted to try out.

I'm pleased to say that everything I've bought works properly so far!

That's one cool MIDI device and setup, too.

Was picking out a psu from my 2nd tier stock to use in a open bench system for some benchmarking and my first choice, a Priver Corp. PPA-0300-01 from an old 2005 Silverstone HTPC case, promptly let out the magic smoke on power-on. Can see at least one blown cap, but they're coated in so much of that white glue/sealer gunk I cant see the brand - not sure if it's worth fixing.

Finally encouraged myself and removed my SB CT1600 from my main retro rig and installed my Audician 32 plus inside. I'm glad I did it. More DOS games are working now without disturbances.

Turbo -> wrote:

Finally encouraged myself and removed my SB CT1600 from my main retro rig and installed my Audician 32 plus inside. I'm glad I did it. More DOS games are working now without disturbances.

Do you notice a large amount of noise from the speakers when you turn your computer off (only complaint I have with the yamaha cards)

Have found out that my artefacting Winfast A380 Ultra 256MB can be fixed with a reflow on two RAM chips.

I'm definitely going to fix it, a 5950 Ultra is still worth something.

I updated the BIOS on my GA-6BXC (Rev 1.9B) and got it running with a Pentium III 600B @ 133 FSB with PC133 CAS 2 memory. I did a SuperPi run on it, and I was surprised that it was slower than the same CPU on my P3V4X Apollo Pro 133A board with the same SD card OS image. I figured the BX @ 133 would be the fastest PIII platform. I also have data from a run on my VC820, and it's a distant third. So much for RDRAM on the Pentium III.
😵

Config:
Pentium III 600B
384 MB PC133 CAS 2 / 512 MB PC800
GeForce 256 DDR / GeForce 2 MX
SoundBlaster Live PCI
USB 2.0 PCI Card
Windows XP SP2 on a 64GB SanDisk Extreme SD Card in an IDE adapter

Final numbers:
P3V4x: 3:34.588
GA-6BXC: 3:37.023
VC820: 3:46.726

I'm guessing some other benchmarks might show other results. From my testing of different memory speeds on the same board with the same CPU clock, it seems like SuperPi is pretty memory speed dependent on Pentium III systems, so the supposedly superior BX memory controller should shine here.

canthearu wrote:

Turbo -> wrote:

Finally encouraged myself and removed my SB CT1600 from my main retro rig and installed my Audician 32 plus inside. I'm glad I did it. More DOS games are working now without disturbances.

Do you notice a large amount of noise from the speakers when you turn your computer off (only complaint I have with the yamaha cards)

This happens with my Yamaha card in my FIC super socket 7 board. It sounds like a crazy sound effect from an early arcade game. Very loud high to low pitch buzzing tone.

Ozzuneoj wrote:

canthearu wrote:

Turbo -> wrote:

Finally encouraged myself and removed my SB CT1600 from my main retro rig and installed my Audician 32 plus inside. I'm glad I did it. More DOS games are working now without disturbances.

Do you notice a large amount of noise from the speakers when you turn your computer off (only complaint I have with the yamaha cards)

This happens with my Yamaha card in my FIC super socket 7 board. It sounds like a crazy sound effect from an early arcade game. Very loud high to low pitch buzzing tone.

IIRC don't you disable ymersion or 3D sound or something like that with the setup software executable? I believe it's a sub menu or page in the software from an option at the bottom. Sorry for the vague descriptions, but strictly off memory since my card is in storage right now. I remember that causing all sorts of noise until I turned it off.

Also added more stuff to the site.

Slowly finishing icon set 24, which will allow a third volume of 64 icons to be assembled for distribution. It would be nice if Geocities gave access to file access logs, so I could see if any of this was worth the effort. Also investigating what is needed to resurrect my old Mac Plus, and debating buying anything for it, since I'll likely never use it even if I do restore it.
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EDIT

Probably the last set for Windows 3, though if I make one more set, that's an even 200 icons for a DOS shell that all of five people still use for more than tuning formula 1 race car engines or milling machines from 1992.
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I finally finished my not-so-good-looking 386 build

MOBO: I was told ECA 3M20 and it looks like that too. Stason mentions SX20 and 25 but mine is a SX16 CPU
FPU: 387SX-16
RAM: 8MB
HD: Quantum Fireball 1080AT with Ontrack Disk Manager
GPU: Paradise WD90C31
SOUND: BTC 1820 OAK OTI601 Mozart
DRIVES: Floppy and 8x MITSUMI
OS: DOS 6.22

Some weird stuff with the FPU (if anyone knows what's going on....??)